M5 Max · 48 GB
614 GB/s memory bandwidth · 38.4 GB usable for models · 9.6 GB left to macOSunverified specs
The short answer
33 models run comfortably and 0 more will run tight at 8K context. The largest that fits is Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 at q4, generating around 70.2 tokens per second.
macOS9.6 GBweights26.3 GBKV cache1.1 GBheadroom11.1 GB
Every model on this Mac
| Model | Size | Best quant | Verdict | Speed est. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5 0.5B Instruct | 490M | bf16 | FITS · 37.3 GB FREE | 520 tok/s |
| BGE-M3 | 567M | bf16 | FITS · 37.3 GB FREE | 449 tok/s |
| Qwen3 0.6B | 600M | bf16 | FITS · 36.3 GB FREE | 425 tok/s |
| Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 | 600M | bf16 | FITS · 37.2 GB FREE | 425 tok/s |
| Llama 3.2 1B Instruct | 1.2B | bf16 | FITS · 35.7 GB FREE | 205 tok/s |
| Whisper Large v3 | 1.6B | bf16 | FITS · 35.3 GB FREE | 164 tok/s |
| Qwen3 1.7B | 1.7B | bf16 | FITS · 34.1 GB FREE | 150 tok/s |
| Llama 3.2 3B Instruct | 3.2B | bf16 | FITS · 31.5 GB FREE | 79.4 tok/s |
| Qwen3 4B | 4B | q8 | FITS · 32.9 GB FREE | 120 tok/s |
| Qwen3 Embedding 4B | 4B | q8 | FITS · 32.9 GB FREE | 120 tok/s |
| Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 | 7.3B | q8 | FITS · 29.6 GB FREE | 65.7 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 7B Instruct | 7.6B | bf16 | FITS · 22.7 GB FREE | 33.5 tok/s |
| InternVL3 8B | 8B | q8 | FITS · 29.9 GB FREE | 60.0 tok/s |
| Llama 3.1 8B Instruct | 8.0B | bf16 | FITS · 21.3 GB FREE | 31.7 tok/s |
| Qwen3 8B | 8.2B | q8 | FITS · 28.5 GB FREE | 58.5 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5-VL 7B Instruct | 8.3B | q8 | FITS · 29.1 GB FREE | 57.8 tok/s |
| Gemma 2 9B IT | 9.2B | q8 | FITS · 28.6 GB FREE | 51.9 tok/s |
| Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct | 10.7B | bf16 | FITS · 17.0 GB FREE | 23.8 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 14B Instruct | 14.7B | q8 | FITS · 21.2 GB FREE | 32.6 tok/s |
| Qwen3 14B | 14.8B | q8 | FITS · 21.3 GB FREE | 32.4 tok/s |
| GPT-OSS 20B | 21B | q8 | FITS · 15.7 GB FREE | 133 tok/s |
| Codestral 22B v0.1 | 22.2B | q8 | FITS · 12.9 GB FREE | 21.6 tok/s |
| Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 | 24B | q8 | FITS · 11.6 GB FREE | 20.0 tok/s |
| Gemma 3 27B IT | 27B | q8 | FITS · 9.7 GB FREE | 17.8 tok/s |
| Gemma 2 27B IT | 27.2B | q8 | FITS · 9.5 GB FREE | 17.6 tok/s |
| Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 2507 | 30.5B | q6 | FITS · 12.8 GB FREE | 190 tok/s |
| Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B Instruct | 30.5B | q6 | FITS · 12.8 GB FREE | 190 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 32B Instruct | 32.5B | q4 | FITS · 18.0 GB FREE | 27.9 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct | 32.5B | q4 | FITS · 18.0 GB FREE | 27.9 tok/s |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B | 32.5B | q4 | FITS · 18.0 GB FREE | 27.9 tok/s |
| Qwen3 32B | 32.8B | q6 | FITS · 9.6 GB FREE | 19.1 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5-VL 32B Instruct | 33B | q4 | FITS · 17.7 GB FREE | 27.5 tok/s |
| Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 | 46.7B | q4 | FITS · 11.1 GB FREE | 70.2 tok/s |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | 70.6B | — | OVER | — |
| Qwen2.5 72B Instruct | 72.7B | — | OVER | — |
| Llama 3.2 90B Vision Instruct | 88B | — | OVER | — |
| GPT-OSS 120B | 116.8B | — | OVER | — |
| Qwen3 235B-A22B | 235B | — | OVER | — |
| DeepSeek V3 | 671B | — | OVER | — |